Maylis de Kerangal - The Heart

* * *

Striding calmly, his pace unvarying, Révol reaches his office without deviating from his trajectory to respond to other people’s greetings and remarks, to the papers that are already being handed to him, to the intern who is already dogging his footsteps, requesting his attention. Using his key, he enters through an unmarked door and prepares for the day’s work: hangs his putty-colored trench coat on the hook stuck to the back of the door, puts on his white coat, switches on the coffee machine and the computer, drums his fingers on the paperwork that covers his desk, checks the category of each pile, then sits down, connects to the Internet, scans the e-mails in his in-box, writes a couple replies — no hellos or best regards, no vowels or punctuation — then gets up and takes a deep breath. He is feeling good this morning.

He is a tall, skinny man, hollow-chested and round-bellied (solitude), long arms and legs, white lace-up Repetto shoes. There is something loose and vague about him, suggested perhaps by his youthful appearance and the way he leaves his coat open all the time, so that when he walks down a corridor it flaps to either side of him, like a pair of wings, revealing his jeans and the crumpled white shirt beneath it.

* * *

The little red light at the base of the coffee machine is illuminated and a bitter smell spreads through the room as the electric plate heats nothing: the glass pot sits on his desk, the last drops of coffee inside it turning lukewarm. However tiny — twenty square feet, tops — this private space is a privilege in the hospital, and it is surprising how impersonal, how messy, how frankly unclean it is: a swivel chair that is quite comfortable despite the high seat position; the desk where paper products of all kinds are piled up — loose sheets, notebooks, Post-it notes — alongside plastic bags full of ballpoint pens bearing the acronyms of laboratories; a bottle of San Pellegrino, the water inside it flat; a framed photograph of Mont Aigoual. Punctuating the clutter, arranged in an isosceles triangle, a Venetian-glass paperweight, a stone tortoise, and a pencil holder bring perhaps the only hint of a personal touch. Along the back wall, a metal shelf supports archive boxes marked by year and various folders, a thick layer of dust, and some rare books whose titles you can read if you get close enough: the two volumes of L’homme devant la mort by Philippe Ariès; La sculpture du vivant by Jean Claude Ameisen; a book by Margaret Lock— Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death —with a cover showing an illustration of a human brain in two colors; a back issue of the Revue neurologique from 1959; and a thriller by Mary Higgins Clark, Moonlight Becomes You —a book that Révol likes a lot, for reasons that will become clear. Apart from that, the room is windowless and fluorescent-lit, giving it the harsh luminosity of a kitchen at three in the morning.

* * *

The ICU is a place apart within the hospital, a place for tangential lives, deep comas, terminal cases — for those bodies situated midway between life and death. A place of corridors and rooms, where all is in suspense. Révol works in this twilit territory — the underside of the diurnal world, where life is continuous and stable, where the days pass in light, rushing toward future plans — the way you might fiddle around in the dark pockets and hidden folds of a large, old overcoat. This is why he likes being on duty on Sundays, at night — has liked it since he was a young intern. You can imagine him then, a long-limbed student in love with the idea of duty itself, that feeling of being needed and yet independent, required to ensure the continuity of medical care for a given area, vigilant and responsible. He enjoys the intensity, the specific temporality, the fatigue that acts like a surreptitious stimulant, gradually rising through the body, accelerating and sharpening it, in a way that is almost erotic; he likes the vibratile silence, the half-lit atmosphere — machines with lights that blink in the darkness, bluish computer screens, desk lamps that glow like candles in a painting by La Tour ( The Newborn , for example) — and the physical feeling of being on duty: the isolation, the sense of being cut off from the world, as if the department were a spaceship entering a black hole, a submarine diving into the deepest abyss, into the Mariana Trench. But for a long time now, Révol has been drawing something else from it: the naked awareness of his existence. Not the feeling of power, a megalomaniac exaltation, but its very opposite: the influx of lucidity that regulates his actions and sifts his decisions. A fix of sangfroid.

* * *

Department meeting: the handover. The teams for both shifts are there, in a circle, some standing, some leaning against the walls, some holding mugs of coffee. The senior doctor who led the previous shift is a guy in his thirties, sturdily built, thick-haired, with muscular arms. Radiating exhaustion. He gives a brief rundown on the situation of each patient in the department — for example, the absence of any noteworthy change in that eighty-year-old man, still unconscious after sixty days of intensive care, whereas the neurological state of the young girl, admitted two months ago after an overdose, has deteriorated — before talking at greater length about the new arrivals: a homeless woman of fifty-seven with advanced cirrhosis, who was admitted after undergoing convulsions in the homeless shelter and whose hemodynamic state remains unstable; a man in his forties, admitted in the evening after a massive coronary, who is presenting with a cerebral ischemia — he had been jogging on the seafront, toward the Cap de la Hève, wearing expensive running shoes, a fluorescent-orange bandana around his head, when he collapsed outside the Café de l’Estacade, and even though he was wrapped in a thermal blanket, his body had been blue by the time he reached the hospital, soaked with sweat, facial features sunken. What’s happening with him? Révol asks questions in a neutral voice, leaning against the window. A nurse replies that the vital signs (pulse, blood pressure, body temperature, respiration) are normal, urine flow is weak, a peripheral venous catheter has been inserted. Révol doesn’t know this girl. He inquires about the patient’s blood tests and she responds that they are being carried out now. Révol checks his watch: all right, let’s go. Everyone leaves the room.

* * *

Everyone except the nurse, who waits behind, intercepts Révol and puts out her hand: Cordélia Owl, I’m new, I was in the OR before. Révol nods: Okay, welcome to the team. If he took a closer look, he would see that she is rather strange-looking: not drunk or hungover, but she has marks on her neck that look like hickeys, her lips are swollen and too red despite the absence of lipstick, her hair knotted, knees bruised; perhaps, if he looked closer, he would wonder at the source of that vague smile, that Mona Lisa smile which never leaves her face, even when she is leaning over her patients to examine their eyes and mouth, inserting breathing tubes, checking vital signs, administering drugs, and perhaps he would end up guessing that she had seen her lover again that night, that he had called her after weeks of silence, the bastard, and that she had gone to their date sober and ravishing, dressed to the nines, smoky-eyed, shiny-haired, hot-breasted, determined to maintain a friendly distance but not the greatest actress in the world, whispering Hi how are you? Nice to see you again, while her entire body radiated her arousal, incubated her excitement, an ember. They’d had a couple beers and made an attempt at conversation that never went anywhere, so she had gone outside for a smoke, telling herself I should go now, this is stupid, it’s pointless, I should go, but he had joined her outside, I won’t stay long, I want to get to bed early tonight, faking her out, and then he’d taken out his lighter and lit her cigarette, she’d leaned her head down, sheltering the flame in her hands, and a few locks of hair had fallen over her face, flirting with the fire, and in an automatic gesture he’d brushed the hair back behind her ear, the flesh of his fingertips grazing her temple — all those well-worn seduction techniques — and, bang, she’d felt her legs go weak, as if someone shoved the backs of her knees forward. It was crazy: a second before there had been no spark between them, no chemistry, nothing, and then the next thing she knew they were staggering under a neighboring porch, sheltered by the darkness and the smell of cheap wine, knocking against trash cans, revealing the zones of white flesh, the tops of thighs appearing from under jeans or pantyhose, bare stomachs exposed by the lifting of shirts, buttocks by the unbuckling of belts, the two of them simultaneously freezing and boiling, desire crashing into desire … Yes, if Révol looked more closely, he would see a girl who was curiously alert and alive, despite her lack of sleep, a girl who was more ready for the day than he was, a girl he’d be able to count on.